Michelle Obama Reveals the Real Reason She Skipped Trump’s Inauguration Amid Rumors Her ‘Marriage Was Falling Apart’
Michelle Obama is setting the record straight about her marriage again. The former first lady turned heads when she didn’t attend Donald Trump’s inauguration, and now she’s finally explaining her decision to skip out.
On her podcast IMO, which she hosts with her brother Craig Robinson, she revealed that she made the firm judgment ahead of time, saying that missing the inauguration was “the choice that was right for me.” The confession was part of a conversation with Taraji P. Henson, where they talked about the criticisms Black women face when they’re in the spotlight.
“People couldn’t believe that I was saying no for any other reason; they had to assume that my marriage was falling apart,” she recounted about seeing headlines and news about a rumored divorce with her husband, Barack because she missed out on the inauguration and Jimmy Carter’s funeral. “It took everything in my power to not do the thing that was perceived as right, but do the things that was right for me, that was a hard thing for me to do.”
Initially, she would be making excuses and essentially “tricking herself” into not going to the event. “It started with not having anything to wear,” the Becoming author said. “I was like, if I’m not going to do this thing, I got to tell my team, I don’t even want to have a dress ready, right? Because it’s so easy to just say let me do the right thing.”
As the only Black first lady to this day, Michelle confessed that she had to face some uphill battles when her husband was in office. “Some of the most hurtful stuff that I experienced entering this life of public service at the heights that we entered into was during my husband’s presidential campaign [was] just me telling the truth of who we were, you know, just humanizing him as a man,” she said.
“[I’m] saying, ‘He’s a great man, but he’s not perfect, you know? He’s got his foibles and his flaws,’ ” she continued. “The first thing that some female journalist said is that I was bitter. I was emasculating him just by sort of trying to tell the truth about what life is, right? And then you get labeled as angry, you know, because you talk forcefully or passionately about something, even if it’s in the context of great joy and pride, that the first label they put on us as Black women is that we are angry.”
This isn’t the first time Michelle has extinguished the rumors. In the first episode of her podcast IMO, Michelle talked about how she handled life in the public eye as a first lady and after her husband’s two terms. “People always ask me and Barack, how did we stay hopeful in, not just the eight years that we were in the White House, but beyond?” she said. “Because, let me tell you, there was a lot of negative energy flipping our way—a lot of rumors, a lot of gossip, a lot of, you know, my husband wasn’t born in this country…we weren’t patriotic, he didn’t get into Harvard.”
